PETER SMITH: THE ELUSIVE “MODERATE MUSLIM”
“The threat we face is existential. Continuing ignorance of its nature on the part of western political leaders, the intelligentsia and assorted useful idiots will be our undoing. We better ‘get busy’ learning and living or ‘get busy’ deferring and dying. Think it can’t happen? Ask the Jews.”
It comes as no surprise that tolerant and pacific followers of the Prophet opt for the most part to stay mum. Knowing full well that their sacred texts extol violence, which leaves little room for doctrinal debate, they are also aware that the creed’s more ardent acolytes have knives at the ready.
Islam has five pillars. They are inwardly focussed and innocuous taken in isolation. The problem lies elsewhere — in the Koran and Hadiths and in the widespread preaching of intolerance, domination and violence which are integral and endemic to that scripture.
Apologists for Muslims and Islam also have five pillars. These are not innocuous. They support a flaccid and vacillating response to a dire threat. In no strict order, these pillars are as follows.
- Terrorism has nothing to do with true Islam.
- The vast majority of Muslims are moderate.
- Western wrong-doing and war-mongering inspires terrorism.
- Alienation, disadvantage, and/or mental instability are often behind home-grown terrorism.
- Muslims suffer most from Islamic terrorism.
On the first, a modern version of an old adage is apropos. There are none so blind as those useful idiots in the West who, having not read a word of Islamic scripture or any critiques of it, conclude in the face of carnage that Islam is a religion of peace. It is not clear what can be done about this astounding level of ignorance.
Certainly many thousands of imams can’t be blamed. They pray openly for Muslim domination and for the universal application of sharia law. They quote their scripture. They encourage jihad. I have seen numbers of them on television and, more starkly, on YouTube before they are taken down, and read accounts of many others.
Korans can be bought by anybody for a small price. Equally, books on Islam by Mark Steyn, Mark Durie, Robert Fletcher and others are readily obtainable. Churchill is on the record on one side of the Atlantic and John Quincy Adams on the other. And now, bravely or foolhardily, Egypt’s President Sisi has called out the religion of peace. (editor’s note: watch the video below to learn what happens when a British political candidate quotes Churchill on “the curses Islam lays on its votives”)
I can only assume that the ignorance exhibited by political leaders like President Obama and prime ministers Cameron, Hollande and Merkel is wilful. Or, does it mean that they have accepted dhimmitude ahead of time? As dhimmis, of course, they will be able to live peacefully while they show deference to Muslims and pay the jizya. I simply ask the question: Is this what they mean by the religion of peace?
I witnessed a woman on Fox News downplaying Islamic terrorism by referring to historical instances of Christians attacking abortion clinics and those who work in them. This kind of ‘reasoning’ is gratingly specious. Our civilisation is not under threat at the hands of followers of any faith but Islam.
I will only begin to worry about, say, Mormons when they reveal scriptural plans to take over the world, preach hate, set up no-go areas, and begin a world-wide rampage of beheadings while shouting ‘Holy Joseph Smith is great!’ Maybe a new rider should be added to the right of free speech, outlawing specious reasoning. That would be intolerant of course. Useful idiots have rights.
The vast majority of Muslims are moderate, so we hear. I want to know what is meant by ‘moderate’ in this context. My dictionary says moderate means ‘not radical’. It is, I submit, ‘radical’ to cut off people’s heads if they have (according to someone) disagreeable views. On that score, I don’t think the vast majority of Muslims are radical. But are they moderate?
Of the 1.6 billion Muslims, how many believe in the application of harsh punishment (including capital punishment) for one or more of adultery, sodomy, blasphemy, or apostasy? I don’t know the answer, but many Muslim countries have laws on their books meting out death for these ‘offences’. In early 2011, the governor of the Punjab province in Pakistan, Salmaan Taseer, was assassinated for opposing blasphemy laws which had resulted in a Christian woman facing execution.
Mark Durie Islam, Human rights and Public Policy (2009) refers to a poll taken in 2006 which found that 58% of Indonesians believed adulterers should be stoned to death. The Pew Research Centre found in 2010 that 84% of Egyptians, 86% of Jordanians and 76% of Pakistanis favoured death for apostasy.
How many Muslims believe, as the Koran plainly says, that men are superior to women and that wife-beating is permissible? How many believe in female genital mutilation? How may believe in marrying off young girls? How many believe in honour killings. How many believe in amputations for theft? How many believe that Muslims are superior to Kafirs? How many believe that Sharia law should be the law of the land?
If any one of the questions above draws a ‘yes’ I would not regard the person as moderate. I don’t think it is at all clear that the vast majority of Muslims are moderate. Moderation certainly conflicts with their scripture and that must make it difficult to be moderate.
On Western wrong-doing, most blame for inspiring terrorism is accorded to the Iraq War and its aftermath. Take out a strong man, put a tribal society in the hands of the majority and then skedaddle and trouble will brew, as it has. However, 9/11 predated the Iraq War, as did the first attack on the World Trade Centre in 1993 and the bombing of USS Cole in 2000.
How, for example, can the restoration of radical Islamism in Iran in 1979, or the current internecine conflict in Syria (which spawned ISIS) or the civil disarrays in Libya and in Yemen, or the vicious activities of Boko Haram in Nigeria, Chad, Niger and Cameroon be attributed to western wrong-doing and warmongering? How can the visceral hatred of Israel? The answer is that they can’t; though self-loathing Western intellectuals are bound to find a way of sheeting some blame home to George W. Bush.
Radical Islam is on the march. Thinking that we caused it leads to appeasement and inevitably to defeat. The Versailles Treaty did not cause Hitler and, in any event, apologies for it would not have stopped him.
‘The perpetrator was deranged’. This is the case, we are told, whether the perpetrator is hacking at rookie cops in New York or shooting an unarmed soldier in Ottawa or killing people in a cafe in Sydney. The tenuous nature of this explanation becomes apparent when there is more than one perpetrator. It is more difficult to say that the two, three or more perpetrators acting together were all deranged. No-one, so far as I know, has called the Charlie Hebdo killers deranged. Let me be the first, because anyone who deliberately sets out to kill men and women going about their normal daily affairs or schoolchildren is deranged.
In the case of Islamic terrorists they have been deranged not by disadvantage (plenty of people are disadvantaged and struggle on without killing people) but by a poisonous creed.
It is true that Muslims are now suffering most from Islamic terrorism, if a death count is the measure. But if you are a Jew or Christian, as yet unharmed, be in no doubt (wherever you are) that your turn will come unless Islamism is defeated. All despotic regimes provide the same generic lesson in tactics.
They get rid of their internal competitors before turning their attention outwards. It is probably despotism 101. Ernst Röhm’s Brown Shirts provided the initial vanguard for Hitler in ridding him of competitors, before he replaced them with the SS. A complementary tactic is to scare those at home before those abroad.
Which moderate Germans would not have been afraid and fallen into line when they saw Jews, Gypsies and dissidents, and anyone found helping them, being brutalised and hauled away. So, yes, at this stage, Muslims are being killed — and being cowed — in larger numbers than are non-Muslims. And, make no mistake; the message is being received in Europe, as it is everywhere where Muslims congregate.
The message to Muslims is clear. There is no future for you in opposing us. If you were a Muslim with a wife and family, which side of the street would you choose to be on when the crunch comes?
To sum up: Terrorism has everything to do with Islam; a religion of jihad not of peace. Even if the vast majority of Muslims are moderate, which is conjectural, it makes no difference; the tough guys will cow them. Blaming Western wrong-doing is akin to blaming French intransigence at Versailles for Hitler: even if it true, which is extremely doubtful, it is now totally irrelevant to solving the problem. All Islamic terrorists are deranged, which rather negates any likelihood of successful intervention with social programs or psychotherapy. While Muslims are currently dying at a greater rate than non-Muslims this is a temporary aberration which Islamic barbarians intend to correct given half a chance.
The threat we face is existential. Continuing ignorance of its nature on the part of western political leaders, the intelligentsia and assorted useful idiots will be our undoing. We better ‘get busy’ learning and living or ‘get busy’ deferring and dying. Think it can’t happen? Ask the Jews.
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